A Chat With Brandon Sanderson

welcome everybody to another author interview today I am sitting down with the fantastic Brandon Sanderson the most requested author I have had on this channel by far how you doing day Brandon I'm doing great it's great to have you here well thanks for having me on of course of course so I just want to go ahead and say right away you're about to have a book come out star sight I'm very excited for it I imagine you're currently doing a lot of touring marketing all these things as well yeah it's it's really interesting because you spend all this time as a writer trying to break in right and you spend all that time by yourself alone in a room telling stories and hoping someone will eventually listen to them and then you start to get published which is feels great but then you realize oh now I have to divide my time between actually sitting in my room writing and going out and convincing people to read the books that I have written and I'm super happy that people do but but yeah it's this weird balance you don't expect it at least I didn't as an author I don't know what I thought I thought I'll sit in my basement and tell stories and other people will handle all of that want to meet me write people want to want to chat with me which is also super flattering and cool but it also means that you have to get really good at time management in this job yes it's a definitely a learned skill that I'm still struggling with myself I spoke with Brent weeks and he described it as he sits in his cave writing and every now and then his publishers come by and pull him out of his cave and throw him in front of people and he's got to start speaking and learning how to publicly speak so that's very it sounds very shocking I volunteered to be in front of cameras which is an interesting a process myself is such a naturally nice and charismatic person that I'm sure it's not that much of a problem for him but I can totally understand that that sort of attitude this dual life that we lead I often tell friends of mine who are you know regular businesspeople right they're like oh you have such an interesting job and I'm like it's really weird because mmm it's like I am both the designing the shoes and the celebrity who wears the shoes in order to promote the shoes and the CEO of the company that that is selling the shoes and a lot of different hats to wear and it all kind of comes from this place of being creative and wanting to tell stories and the business side of it is just not something that I was prepared for or even really that interested in but a lot of people don't warranties you become a novelist you are starting a small business probably the same thing for a YouTube career right you're a small business owner now and it comes with all the headaches the company your own business but none of the background for most of us in any sort of economics or business or anything like that so the fact that we managed to do it without getting in trouble with the IRS or sued right and left is always a big relief to me it's it's like you have to pick up a business degree pretty much just on the fly and hope the people around you know what they're talking about enough to keep you out of prison exactly I'm really interested in so the one of the things that I consistently have hear from people who have met you and worked with you is that your engagement with the community is just stellar from my perspective it seems away as well active on Twitter constantly updating on book progress have you kind of developed that system as well or is that just something that from day one it was like no I'm gonna just keep people completely in the loop I'm gonna let them know how I'm going through the process because in terms of authors being open about at what stages they are in the books I mean you're the only one I'm aware of who says this percentage I am done with drafts - yeah that's so this is this is partially how my own style works and it's partially me being a product of my generation right and I'm getting you know I'm in my 40s now so I'm no longer than the young new kid on the block but for four years I was the first generation who grew up with the Internet who was also publishing books right and I grew up in the era when the internet was first starting to become a thing and so I lived through the area era of wanting to hear more about my favorite authors and not having any method at all of hearing when the next David Eddings or Robert Jordan or Anne McCaffrey book will come out and then I transitioned into the period when the internet was around but a lot of this old guard just didn't use it very much and they got somewhat frustrating to me I mean Robert Jordan had a blog and it was a good blog to his credit he had it on one of the sand sites but it always felt like it was two steps removed even the blog because it was him writing something and sending it to another person who then posted it online and of course George Martin has a blog as well though he calls it not a blog that's the generation I'm from people don't blog anymore right that's not the thing it's it's social media and I was starting to break in right when social media was becoming a force and I just kind of naturally started using it it wasn't a a big plan on my part from a marketing angle or anything I was just on these websites I'm on reddit because I got on reddit ten years ago when read it started to get big and my god this is cool this lets me find the things that I want to want to read about and whatnot and I'm just there I post on Facebook and Twitter because I'm on Facebook and Twitter but you know it's it's coming from me wanting to know more about my favorite authors when I was growing up and realizing hey I can do it what fine I find really fascinating fascinating is the next generation right the people who are have these hybrid YouTube and writing careers like John Green right and these sorts of things we're now social media and new media like YouTube is just kind of interweaving with old media like storytelling in really fascinating ways and I find that all pretty cool there's there's definitely an evolution happening there that I find really interesting we're now you know they're you know you know you're putting out the percentage of here's what I'm done well there's also authors on YouTube that say okay I'm sitting down and writing page 512 yep and here's the revision I'm making and it's it's this evolution of what's happening with social media integrating with writing where it also seeing celebrity rise like you know Tolkien was never sitting there having too do these like Late Show interviews because even though he made the Lord of the Rings that just wasn't in his job description nope no definitely and it's it's a different world and in some ways it seems brand new and in some ways it actually seems like an echo something that used to be like if you go back and read about Michelangelo and some of these great artists in the past they would be part of a community right a local community but people who were aware of what they were doing and they were interacting with the other artists and it's almost like they had like a group of patrons who were then the wealthy elite but they were always kind of in the loop and the artists kind of worked for them and with them and these sorts of things and so now we just have that on a larger scale and I find that very interesting I find kind of the echoes of that patron situation we even have you know patreon right as a site which harkens back to those days when an artist would have a wealthy patron that wouldn't pay and be like all right make this piece of art alright make whatever you want and then I'll be happy and that sort of thing is it's just really interesting as a as a creator as a storyteller in this this modern age I'll give you the same warning I gave print weeks where I'm convinced the next 10 years your publisher whoever's gonna tell you and you're gonna need to start a YouTube channel you're gonna need a vlogging even still a thing like I feel like like each generation has their thing that they do and then sticks with it like my generation was blogging and Facebook and Twitter and it feels like younger people are not getting on Facebook and Twitter the generation between was vlogging and doing Instagram but what's the what are my kids gonna do right I've got a I've got a 12 year old he's right on that cusp where he's gonna be doing all this I'm sure that'll be something completely different it may not be YouTube though it probably will just knowing where they spend their time you know watching a watching Let's Plays and and random vloggers do pranks on each other is basically how my chilled spend all of their days well it to me the biggest change so I'm like the tail into the Millennials I'm 24 about 325 so I'm right at the end of them and then there's the Jin Z and to me the biggest shift isn't what they're using it's how they're using it because I still have that like keep a wall up a little bit mentality of like my life is here my channels here the people below me there's none it's just this complete saturation where everything's recorded and out there daily vlogs and I just I couldn't do that that that scares me a bit no we'll see you know it's it's it's really fun to see the people of my generation and slightly older children like you know Jack Black's kid getting him on all yeah things like that it's fun to see how that kind of brings some families together and yeah maybe my 12 year old to be like dad we're doing vlogs what are you doing today I just you know my job is not really exciting I get lots of people who will write to me be like can I come intern for you can I come apprentice under you what can I do can I get you cups of ice water or something because they just evolved I'm like there's nothing to do I sit in front of a computer and I think and you know that's eight hours you're not seeing anything it's it's funny to me I don't know if you've ever followed this but people have tried over and over again to start up like a best author search reality show along the lines of you know Great British Bake Off or things like that or the like we're gonna get a bunch of authors and you know do American Idol site thing and every one of them flops hardcore because writing is not interesting the product is interesting but the actual making of it like those shows thrive on there being conflict between people you could do it with the television show or film really well because there's all sorts of stressors and people ask me to talk to each other about solving their problems if I run into a problem I sit there for an hour and think about how to solve the problem and then eventually try something and if it doesn't work I try something else and it's all just a person in it with with a keyboard so yeah it's very dramatic on Dancing with the Stars when somebody falls and sprains their ankle where you know you don't break your finger typing on your keyboard no no in fact if you did you can still type yeah you won't realize you've made a mistake until like several days later you're like oh I branched off on this path and the trying this thing it's just not working but to go back and revise all along that thing real boring well I that's a nice segue into a large part of why I do these interviews I love you know I don't feel authors have a lot of mediums who directly you know face-to-face interact with fans so I was able to ask a bunch of fans you know they could sit down with you what would you like that and the question comes from one of my patrons who said I would ask Brandon Sanderson what it felt like on the release date of the gathering storm before the feedback came in was how did it feel not knowing how the wheel time fan base would receive you yet yeah so um it was probably some of the most nervous I've been for a book launch definitely in fact I don't I don't know that may be a memory of light was more but I'm not sure might have been Gathering Storm that was the the most nerve-wracking now the thing is the way I work I generally have a really good handle on how people are gonna respond to a book ahead of time I use extensive beta reads I have lots of people looking at the book and I'm getting clean reads from people who are not tainted by other people who've read it just giving me their feedback and things like this very consistently through the whole process I am almost never surprised by responses to books and usually I have ironed out most of the problems that I've run into through going through all that beta read process and things but Gathering Storm we only had like four beta readers because that's all that they would they would you know Harriet was comfortable with and there were people that I had to print off copies at Jordan con and hand them to them because they couldn't have electronic copies Harriet was very worried about the book leaking which is legit right but and so like you know I printed copying handed Jason I'm like alright you know you're one of my only beta readers you know give it to me straight let me make let me know and so even with that though I did have some instinct for how it was going to be received and things like that but I would say it is the the most nervous I've been for a book launch is I had fewer beta readers plus I didn't know how this audience would react right like my audience for my various series I have a pretty good handle on what they've liked what they haven't liked and these sorts of things and I don't do a lot of like adapting like if there's how to explain this I try to make the best book of the style I'm trying to write understanding that things that people didn't like in one book they'll probably won't like in the sequel because that's the story I'm trying to tell what I'm always looking for is where do I miss fire when I think people will enjoy something and they don't or where a story element for a certain subset of the readership I created that for them and then that subset of the reshipped just does not like it at all then I've misfired that sort of thing so yeah Gathering Storm was was nerve-racking I had an awareness that if there was going to be a problem it was going to be Matt that if there's a place where I where I didn't quite get on target it was going to be him because uh you know Jason had told me already and I had tried to fix it but I just wasn't up to it yet right you know that's where my skill level was at the time I think I got better as the books progressed but you know so it turned out Gavin Stern came out and I got generally the reaction from the what Wheel of Time audience at large that I expected and that was really relieving to me the things that that I had known were weaknesses were still weaknesses like the timeline issues and Matt's character but the things that I had thought were strengths were indeed strengths and that gave me a big boost going forward that you know let's try and work on the things that that I'm weaker on but keep following my instinct for the things that I think people are going to like and it treated me well all the way through the series the only thing that I would say in the whole wheel time series release that surprised me that I didn't realize was going to be a response was that Pat and fain people wanted more of an ending for him that didn't come out in the beta reads but it became kind of pervasive response that a lot of people gave reading the last book and it's one that looking back after they were saying I'm like yeah I can see that I could totally see that that could have been you know just another chapter in there to really bring this to fruition because we've been following patent fame sons book one that way I would say it's the only one that that I completely didn't have didn't have on my radar it's it's fascinating for me to hear and makes total sense that okay after the first book a lot of the stress just kind of sheds away and you're left with this okay I can I can manage this but one other question I had here was the process of getting from this is Ashley from another booktuber Murphy and up here the process of getting from you know taking the phone call you'll do it to writing your first pages in The Wheel of Time yeah I imagined that A to Z there was quite an extensive journey it was so got the call in September I believe M September October somewhere around there and that was the are you interested call from Harry and then the yes I wanted to do it was sometime November ish 2007 um you know she'd taken some time to think about it and then she come back and said yes you're the guy I want you to do this for those who don't know the story I didn't know her or Robert Jordan it was came out of nowhere for me I just got a phone call one day I didn't apply or anything like that and so we did a deal really fast I told my agent just say yes it doesn't matter what they offered say yes he was not be with that but I just wanted to get moving so we said yes she offered me a very good deal like first offer so it didn't even matter and I flew to Charleston in December and I remember this one was December because you can track this by when the interview with dragon mountain came out after the kind of announcement about me I was doing that interview right before and I went to Harriet's house and she picked me up from the airport and described Harriet she's like oh boy Harriet is like a cross between a Southern gentlewoman your favorite grandmother and a really really good editor I mean to someone really spot and cut through all of the all the stuff that authors do and get really to the heart of things you took me in she said do you want dinner and I'm like I want the ending she went and got me the material and so what Robert Jordan had that he'd left behind was I kind of lump it into three parts so first there were the scenes he had written and he had written together this in the next part or about 200 pages so he'd written some pages mostly it was the prologue to three books that I split up right big chunks of each of a lot of those scenes like the the old guys sitting on his his porch and watching the storm arrive or the young man on the borderlands who gets his sword from his father and some scenes like that some really powerful of these these Wheel of Time late Wheel of Time jump around the world prologues he had done some of those and then he had done a swath of of Wayne in the White Tower and he had done work on Matt in the Tower of gedgie and he had written the epilogue on the last chapter obviously for those who were not weren't expecting this is his total spoiler he'll put spoilers on this I will absolutely have the one thing he hadn't done yet pairen for the epilogue um he had written little chunks of a lot of these different things and then he had notes the second part of what I've done where he done interviews with his assistants or had written down specific notes on what to handle how to do some of these things and that all kind of lumped together with some notes on Rand specifically like some things like the last battle plays out he said as a kind of conflict between of Rand deciding if people were gonna be left with free will or not right like that sort of instruction nots but he didn't write a ton of actual words about Rand he did leave like instructions along those lines he did write some of the grain and some of Matt and then left instructions for for other things like the whole the whole White Tower sequence with with the Gwaine is a Merlin seat and stuff like that was the most detailed in all of the outline and in all of the the kind of written materials but for Perrin there was basically nothing there was one sentence it said Perrin ends up this king and so that was that was it for that and he had you know like I said some touch stones here for Rand and then the third part of what I was left came on a CD with several gigabytes of information that was just stuff that they had taken off of his computer that they weren't even you know completely sure of what it all was it was just all of this stuff and this is the stuff that that Torrez wouldn't look through that is in the in the library in Charleston I did not spend a lot of time in these notes I've been very upfront with that like there was so much there and what I found is almost all of it were the glossary for the eleven books that he'd done with little changes here and there mixed with lists of names or lists of like he he had like a whole essay that someone had written on doing leatherworking and just a note said I want to use this somewhere right and so a lot of these notes on this thing I like I would spend time in them and I quickly realized I have no idea what is in here is important what is in here that isn't and so I kind of said to Harriet like can I use your assistance Robert Jordan system just to be my librarians for this data if I have a question I'll send them into it but you know I could have spent several years studying that and I think some Wheel of Time fans wish that I had that's just not my process I had Group one and two and I had a lot of instincts from having read the series a lot and so starting in January I reread the series and I actually blog to this kind of my responses to the books this would be 2008 just reading rereading them knowing I was going to finish the series and I did all of that and what I was doing while I was right reading that was looking for dangling threats that Robert Jordan had left that he hadn't tied up and I was making a big list of those to send to the assistants to see if there was anything at all in the notes anywhere about these dangling threads and also kind of just trying to sketch out what the character arcs are for the characters so that I can figure out like where was he taking parent he didn't leave me anything on what I should do with parent where is the natural momentum of the series taking parent how can I do that in a way that will fulfill his character arc but also be interesting and not just expected my biggest worry actually with the series was not that I would go too far doing new things it was that the series would feel to rehash at the ending right like we've seen this in some of the movies that have come out like you know Jurassic world my worry was that um that I would play it too safe and in playing it to say that instead of being something new and dynamic which each of the books that he would have done finishing the series would have been it would feel like just this really really safe let's just do the same sorts of things again and wrap it up really cleanly and safely and I didn't want to do that I felt like that was that was the biggest danger and I knew I wanted to take some risks I've often mentioned obvi nd going into the pillars and Rhydian was one of the things that I added because I'm like I wanna you know I want to flash forward we've done lots of flashbacks let's do another flash-forward because we kind of had hints that that sort of thing happens and I wanted to kind of dig into some of the lore and I wanted to you know really give interesting wrap ups to the characters and so this whole time I was doing that while I was doing trial scenes from character voices that didn't end up in the book kind of like monologues or just scenes of here's the character going about their their normal day so I can get down how their voices and how they feel and and sending those to hair it and saying Harriet where am I on where am i off what's how's the voice of the character um and she was my guiding light on those things when things characters were feeling wrong she would write back and say you know nudge it this way you know give IV and a few more i'il specific metaphors make your think like an eye ill you're making your sound too much like a wet Lander and things like this and all of this sort of feedback before actually wrote anything then I flew to Charleston this would have been late spring early summer 2008 with my big outline that I had been constructing using Robert Jordans finished scenes as big touchstones and then we got I got on a big sheet of paper asked them to get like some of this butcher paper put it on the table and I started writing out all my ideas for all the plot lines and things like that and brainstorming with Harriet and with Maria and with Alan and trying out on them some of the weirder ideas that I had and getting their feedback responses and building like this whole thing that I eventually turned into the final version outline that I showed to them and said this is where I'm gonna go got approval on that and then just started writing having done all that groundwork so this would have been probably late summer 2008 launched into it back then I thought it would be one book I was gonna try really hard to make it one book and this is where the timeline issues between Gathering Storm and Terris midnight came from is those books were written to be the chapters to be intermingled with one another and when the feedback came from or was we have to split this Robert Jordan had said that he wanted the book be so big you had to get a wheelbarrow at the book store to get it out and I took that to heart and I was going to try to write like a million word book and they just wouldn't let me get away with it maybe maybe Jim could have done it but they wouldn't let me get away with it so the feedback came that we needed to split it and this was after I had a big chunk of Gathering Storm and towers of midnight written because again they were written you know together and so that's when I they just wanted to split them right in the mist like you know take the first three hundred thousand words make those a book terrible that would have been an absolute disaster I've seen that happen with some of my friends books where the publishers that's too long were splitting in the middle that would not have worked and I went back and said no no no you'll you'll have another book ten if you do that the problem with book ten is all set up and no payoff and I said we have to take it and do the plot lines separately getting everyone up to the point where we can come back together for a memory of light and I pitched this really hard I said we're gonna do you know ran and the Gwaine we're gonna do parent and that we're gonna do these separate narratives and it's the timeline I knew was gonna get really wacky because of that but Jim and had wacky timelines in The Wheel of Time in the past he just was naturally better with with weaving that that's one thing that I'm not naturally good at as is keeping the timeline all in my head I just kind of write the book and look for the character arcs and the important moments and I count on my assistants to be like yeah this can't happen because on this day you know they can't get to this place and then they keep me honest and then we go back and revise but I I'm the one who decided how to split the books so that that Gathering Storm entires midnight each actually had an ending and I I'm really pleased with how that went the big casualty for that was parent being able to see Rand at Dragon mount and Gathering Storm which I had written to work really well in coordination with Karen's own plotline which you wouldn't get for another book right and so that's the only big casually I feel from this other than the being confused wait we're jumping back in time here and stuff like that but yeah like I grow up a screen that says one year earlier the French voiceover you just can't do that and in the books but but that all kind of came together the the hardest point in the process came actually at a memory of light and I'm not sure why this is I have a couple theories one might have been you know when I started working on gathering storm Harriet was very much in a grieving mode she's like you take this you work on this you come back to me with something and I will edit it but while you're doing that I'm dealing with the fact that my beloved husband has passed away and because of that there was I was working with Harriet but I think people were giving her space and so a lot fewer people were trying to do revisions of the book right like I just had to work with Harriet by a memory of like everyone like it tour and even in Harriet's company was a little panicked because it was the last Wheel of Time book this the the reality of entertainment is for those who don't know you know one percent of your projects support 90 percent of the rest and then there's you know some in the middle that support themselves right and so you have this this really big disparity and book sales you have the Wheel of Time which was selling millions of copies and the number two fantasy series at the publisher was selling a tenth of that right and so they just say there was a lot of stress at the publisher that the series that had basically kept the company going for the last 20 years was ending and everybody wanted to do a revision of that book and it became a constant fight on my part to keep too much meddling from happening to the novel because I was very confident in the novel and I got a little taste of what showrunners have to go through and making you television show without everyone wanting to be involved and that really had to Harriette I think a little anxious and show she was much more micromanaging on the last look than she'd been on the previous two which turned out fine um but it was there were more revisions like my books nowadays I go through five drafts usually memory of light went through fourteen Wow and yeah and you know this is me sitting on an airplane with still physical pieces of paper because nobody wanted to work digitally even though you know like I had gotten my editors on my solo books all move to digital by then but this old guard they're still sending me these pages marked up so I'm like sitting on an airplane with like the tray down and the armrest out and like pages all over the place where there's six different people who have done this scene all giving feedback and trying to decide what does actually feedback I need to listen to what his feedback I need to pretend to listen to and what his feedback I need to ignore and and that got I would not do that again the wheel of time as a general thing was a wonderful experience working with Harriet was amazing she's a really good editor for those who don't know she edited Ender's Game she edited like something several of the great fantasy science fiction books in the history of fantasy and science fiction she's fantastic editor I mean you know she's really good line editor which is kind of a she knows how to take prose and make it great and it was a great experience but those last months of those last revisions on a memory of life if I had to go through that again then I would probably say no to you know a similar project because man it was maddening but we got through it the the book you know came out and did well and the publisher did not collapse afterward by then they had the Stormlight archive which was ended up selling around the same amount as The Wheel of Time so everyone led a big cyber lease when words of radiance came out and people actually bought it and and disaster averted and things like this but but yeah it was a stressful time that's amazing to hear all that and learn see the peek behind the curtain I know you just made a million fans incredibly happy so thank you very much no actually that's a decent transition I wanted to talk about the Stormlight archive and your work with character there yeah because I've found you know from my perspective someone who works as a critic of fantasy you know full-time job now I have seen a rise in mental illness representation and with what seems like authors really taking the time to study these things before they put them in their text in great detail and you know that's very prevalent and Stormlight archive and a few other series you've worked on and I'd love to know how you measure how to properly represent things like depression PTSD these things you've worked with because it's very often people go too far it could become a caricature you know you seem to strike a very good balance at least in my perspective of someone who has been around these things before so how do you as a artists judge what is the proper balance to strike right there's a whole bunch coming together on this one part of this is the idea that coming to understand characters as characters and as individuals and that's a big balance being acted that every author does where you have to imply to the reader that this person is their own person and what's happening to them is individual to them and not trying to speak for a larger group but at the same time making sure that what has happening to them isn't acting like it's speaking to the larger group right and this is kind of a hard thing to explain and this comes down to just good characterization right if you're lazy with your characterization if your character becomes too much of a stereotype really straight from an archetype into a stereotype and then suddenly instead of saying this one person with PTSD has this specific issue that is common to peds people at PTSD but it's not everyone with PTSD this is his struggle or the his struggle with depression instead of doing that you end up in this realm where you're saying well everyone with depression acts like this because you know you've got this character like you of a character so part of it comes down to really being good with characterization which takes a long time my early books that I didn't publish this you know was something I was bad at doing and then the other thing is coming to to talk to people and listen really well the best authors I found are the people who are the best that are listening and the internet gives us huge advantages in this enormous advantages and I would hope that if there's a one of the reasons we're doing better as just entertainment in general at approaching things like this is that we can go and people out there who are who are deeply affected by these things are sharing their stories online in a very intimate and personal way and we can read them and you know thanks to all the people who are sharing their problems and having other's time and saying wow I feel the same thing and it's like this different way for me so that you get to see people who are who have a mental illness or who are non psycho normative or you know I've had life experiences led them to see the world in a different way our different approach you want to take you can see that they're in a bottom lip right if you go on one of these you you read enough of these sorts of things you realize that there there are many different forms of depressions there are people who have depression you can find some through lines and some threads but you start to really see people as individuals rather than as a disease which i think is really important and it was I think harder to do before the internet because those personal stories straight directly from the source we're not as easily available and and now they are but beyond that you know I think we have become better as a society we're not there yet but better society with understanding mental illness and being willing to listen to people rather than need this being able to have let them say I need this right do what I need rather than telling me what I need and and this is this is really helpful for a writer approaching these sorts of things you know the big one of the big lines we walk particularly right fantasy is we want let's let's take you know something like depression which historically people did not treat very well in our in our world and you want to kind of be realistic with that right like you will see people in the Stormlight archive who are trying to you know help people with mental illness and they're doing a really terrible job of it like happen in our world for most of the history of humankind you want to represent that realistically but you don't want to enable people doing that now it's it's the same comes back to the same thing like if you wanted to pick an accurate depiction of racism in a book how do you do that without actually making the the issue worse by giving more momentum to people who have backward thinking ideas and that's a that's a big balance to write like that is a minefield that is really difficult to navigate and the this the unfortunate truth about it is um some of this comes down to writing skill people will judge writers based on their intent will judge their intent based on their skill and so a writer who is worse at writing but who has intense and understanding as good or better than an established writer will do a poor job sometimes with these things and you've got to as a writer be willing to accept the feedback that you've done a poor job an example of this is my my first published book a laundress when I wrote it I did a very kind of top culturally depiction of a character with autism and this was me trying to approach people who are non psycho normative in my books and trying to represent right trying but I didn't know what I was doing yes um I thought I did but I didn't and the the character is kind of a character chair and you know that was my skill level not being good enough but also me thinking I understood more than I did after coming to know some people with autism and really kind of work with some of them and have good friends who were on the spectrum I realized how horrible a job I'd done I'm like well there are two ways to go here one is just to never do it again because you'll be afraid of getting it wrong I can't say that's not legit some people make that decision totally okay you want to go back to the wheel of time Robert Jordan decided not to approach on prejudice based on ethnicity instead made a culture where they approach prejudice based on nationality and that was a big distinction for him in those books because he did he wanted to go a different direction and in some ways this is ignoring the issue but by ignoring that issue we got to tell all sorts of other cool stories and books are trade offs when you're doing this so that's one way you can go I decided like you know I'm gonna keep doing what I was doing this is something that's important to me I have a lot of loved ones who struggle with different forms of mental illness I have a lot of good friends who are who are you know non psycho normative if that's even the way to put it I think we're finding better language I don't think that's even the right language to be using and I feel like the more I study humankind and human nature I find out that every person has some very unique struggles with their own psychology and not a lot of them some of them stray into mental illness as it defined by this individuals life is deeply impacted by the way that their brain is working against them and they want to you know not have that anymore some of it is not like you know what is what is my personal thing like I think we all have these for me I don't tend to feel really strong emotions like I'm whatever the opposite of someone who's bipolar is right I wake up feeling basically the same every day same emotions same you know emotional baseline and one of the only things that knocks me out of that is a really good story well told when I read a story this is why I became a writer when I was a teenager and I read some of these stories I suddenly like it's like the world opened up full of color to me in the range of emotional expression I was the and I don't know if that means that I'm emotionally stunted or if it just is you know whatever it's my personal psychology right and this isn't a mental illness this is just how I am and certainly it's something that I found something that mitigated that which was great stories and I latched on to that because it filled a hole in my life because the way my personal psychology was and I think a lot of us do that I think everyone does things like this and it's less that there are people who have mental illness and people that don't it's a wide broad range of spectrum of people who are working on different things and to some people it's like you know what this thing sucks that I have to deal with I've got to learn to deal with it anyway because I can't just make it go away but it sure sucks and other things it's like you know wow this is I think differently than other people let me explore that and see what advantages/disadvantages this gives me and there's this wide range of different personality types and different thought patterns and we pretend that there's people who were broken in people who aren't worth that is just a kind of terrible way to look at it and I don't think I could be realistic with characterization if I weren't dealing with these sorts of things like you know we it feels like storytelling forever is ignored the fact that a significant portion of the population has depression you know we're not talking like one in a thousand people having depression we're talking that you know a not a majority but a significant percentage of the population has depression or will have a period in their life where they're going through a depressive episode and their necks need backs right in fiction you just don't and how can something that's you know by some studies is you know 20% of the population they these studies are hard too hard to quantify so let's not use numbers but a significant portion of the population is struggling you just never see in fiction unless it's a book about how to get over a depression and that just started to feel less and less realistic to me and more like I want to just explore how different people think and act and the challenges they deal with so it wasn't me going into the Stormlight archive saying I am going to deal with mental health and this in the story it was more like I'm dealing with people who have been through extreme stressors in their lives which is a theme in the Kazmir for the way the magic comes about if I'm going to realistically deal with people who have been through extreme stressors in their lives I need to be good at this not bad at this like I was in Elantras and I just had to dive into it and be like I have to embrace this and be good at it and I'll say to the audience I'm still gonna make mistakes guys um and feel free to let me know drop me emails and that I'm not trying to explain the entire experience of people with PTSD or things like this I'm just trying to approach a single individual but at the same time if I'm representing something that you can find damage England you know but this isn't something I intend to stop it's just it's not but it's not something I consider a hallmark of my work I think through a hallmark of my work looking realistically at how different people explore the world and this is just a natural outgrowth of that okay that's very very well put thank you very much you asked me a simple question we get a 20 minute answer hey I much prefer that over the yes/no interviews so that actually you mentioned the Cosby role is gonna continue to explore that a bit more of a fun question here we had from one of the fans and do you have a favorite character you have written in the Stormlight archive and do you have a most difficult character to write and the Stormlight archive so I don't have a favorite actually Robert Jordan has a great quote I heard on interview with him years ago where someone said who's your favorite character and he said the one I'm writing right now and I love that because as a writer you can't you can't play favorites everyone's got to be your favorite there are characters who are more difficult than others however wit is really difficult to write what is the probably the hardest character in in the Stormlight archive to write because I want him to adapt to the scene and have a certain kind of humor adapted to whoever he's talking to and humor is one of those hard things anyway right because it's easy to write your own sense of humor at least I find but you want to book like the Stormlight archive to involve multiple different types of humor to represent different ways that people are right and so it's uh it's very easy for me to do one type but to do other types is a struggle and I struggle meaning that I have to take a lot more time I'm gonna have to go you know watch some stand-up comedians who use that type of humor or go read some pieces me like alright can I capture the soul of this style of humor as opposed to the other style of humor that I've been using here the other style of humor I'm using here and and that can be a real challenge right I am not naturally an insult comic type humor like those types I don't even really enjoy those types of of stand-up and things like that but that's the sort of thing that I have to capture occasionally with wit and that's hard so you literally have to say okay this isn't my humor but I need to do this humor I need to do this humor I need to find something something that's not funny to me needs to be funny to me for this scene and I need to get into that mindset but you know that's what part of being ready to find things fascinating that you would normally find boring you have to you have to find arguments that you would normally find flawed you have to present the best version of that argument because that character believes in it right like this is how how you approach writing while you're in that character's head you have to try to see the world the way they do and that's a challenge is that wholly different from let's say when you're writing starsight plugin for the book here yeah is that very different from when you have to kind of transition into a younger mind or when you're transitioning someone in a pilot you know desperate situation right is it is it a whole like how are those all those different transitions or is if you get better at one type you kind of just get better at all of them well certainly the better you get as a writer the better you get at all of them what makes skyward starsight Steelheart the why a books in some ways a little easier is that you drill into one character really well and get in that mindset and part of the challenge of writing something like Stormlight archive you have to keep a dozen of these things in your head right and I wouldn't say that you know Spencer from skyward isn't is easier than writing any other character but it's really just one viewpoint and you can give to that viewpoint really well if I carry that viewpoint works you can write a complete story with that one viewpoint which is certainly handy and whenever I build a character one of the things I'm looking to do so I'm looking to bind something about myself with something very different for myself and explore the world through this one and kind of rely on this one to be authentic if that makes sense and so that combination serves me very well with my characterization it means I'm always I'm excited because I'm doing something different someone who's different from me and exploring the world through their eyes but I always have a piece of me in the character the lens lets me take my lived experience and put it into the book so if I'm in the mind of a sixteen year old girl there might be things about being a sixteen year old girl that I've never experienced but there'll be parts of their personality that I'm putting in that I have and of course one thing I you know should mention with the mental illness conversation with this conversation is relying a lot on people who do have lived experience reading the books and telling you where you're going wrong is really really handy you know getting some beta readers who were teenagers to read skyward and ask them okay what smacks you was a 40 year old guy writing a teenage girl tell me the scenes that I've just I've just messed up and I don't write characters who are trying very hard to be or being successfully being cool hip young kids because I wasn't one of those even when I was a kid what's that kiddo say yeah I think if I were gonna flop hardcore it might be if I tried to write something that was hey fellow kids sort of stop right I'm sure there are authors who are really good at that sort of thing I've never really tried that if you you know I reach back to my experience and to most people's experience I know where they were just awkward and had no what they were doing and and that's that's really handy when when writing any characters remember and that's you know to an extent we're all kind of playing along with life and kind of trying to figure it out as we go along but you know writing away a the the big difficulties in writing away is general rule of thumb you can't dawdle as much you don't want to do what you do I did in a storm on archive and have for false beginnings or three false beginnings before you get to your actual story right that's just really self-indulgent and it works for a four hundred thousand word epic in a way it just wouldn't work with with the book like you don't write down to teens this is a big mistake people often make when they're new writers you know teens will smell that out if you're writing down to them but you do need to get to the point faster you need to convince them faster that this is going to be actually a good book rather than spending all this time want me entering in circles and then getting to the point that is generally a good rule of thumb of course there's exceptions right you could argue that the golden compass meanders a whole bunch and worked very well for the audience but though no one knew what to do with that book it shelved in like five places in bookstores so yeah you know write be authentic to your own lived experience try some new things with every character you write and meld those two together and that has led me well that's that was great to hear I really appreciate that and that actually kind of lightly touches on something I wanted to ask you about that is kind of become one of the biggest reoccurring arguments I have on the channel here eighty plus thousand people and people debate this and I'd love your perspective there is Jean rrah snobbery and discrimination all over the place and it's not just why it happens to fantasy as well I mean I still maintain to this day that Lord of the Rings has some of the best meditations on post-world War one year up ever we've seen and people just ignore it because now it's got elves and dwarves and it rose like it is gorgeous you right it's up next to things like Hundred Years of Solitude it's just a beautiful piece of writing yeah and the same things happening to why a where there can be an incredible why a book and people will not take it seriously yeah and I've seen quotes from you you push back on this you know other fantasy authors who kind of claim I'm not quite fantasy and it seems like they're just trying to pull away from this and I'll just like you know with your veteran experience in the genre do you think it's getting better now that fantasy is being a little more represented in media it's getting better with some groups this is a really interesting topic to me and it is a very emotional topic to a lot of people myself included you know I came up through academia I have a master's degree in in creative writing and you know I submitted the Stormlight archive to multiple well no it was a launcher so I was submitting launches and I had I didn't have it normally if I wrote that in my some of that in my master's program so I submitting a launcher eventually published novel to MFA programs and I got turned down from all of them right like mum you know my professional work as one of the breakout writers of my generation was not good enough for MFA programs masters in fine arts creative writing and so you could say you know you're gonna have to take what I say with that understanding that I have been snubbed by this community right and so there's obviously going to be a motion there the thing is the people who love so we put up this idea that there's literary fiction and popular fiction which is a false dichotomy that I don't think most of us enjoy that idea and I will preface this by saying a lot of us in the community are way are snobbish ourselves like this is the thing that really gets me is when we are subject to snobbery and then become snobbish ourselves that bugs me that's where you see those quotes where someone says oh I'm not actually fantasy I'm literature and that no way to get under my skin faster than to have an established author say that that's like kind of turning your back on your friends at the lunch table once someone pays the littlest attention to you at the popular kids table that there's there's nothing more yeah it gets under my skin but we can be snobbish toward literary fiction and you know we will be like oh no one likes it it doesn't sell it's just a bunch of stuffy old people writing stories for themselves for each other and ignoring the trends and things like that which is not true either there is fantastic literary fiction out there traditionally called literary fiction there's fantastic stories being told fantastic uses of language this is a true art form that is does great things for us as a society in having and we need to be careful that we're not dismissing the great artistry that is happening just because it isn't the sort of thing we like because that's the problem the rise of nerd culture becoming just popular culture has been really interesting to watch and you see a lot of academia really embracing this you know pop culture studies and ethnographies and things like this about the idea of fantasy you know comic book science fiction culture just becoming a culture what is it in these stories that we love and tracing it back to the fact that you know the men's as we told ourselves thousands upon thousands of years ago share a lot of roots with the stories we're now telling ourselves but acknowledging now that you know we're just all making these things up and what is there in our psyche that wants to read about these sorts of imaginary stories and you can take it from the other direction when saying wow fantasy and science fiction can approach telling stories and approach topics in a way that realistic fiction just can't do you want to have an exploration on what humankind is going to have to confront if we ever meet an alien species that is way different from ourselves you just can't do that right in realistic fiction but this is like something that we need to think about like what is the species do we how do what how do we react how do we think about what if we meet a species of intelligent beings that is not on our intellectual capacity that's between a dolphin and us like that's a question science fiction's been asking for a hundred years and it's really interesting but you can also do these things like I mentioned Robert Jordan saying we're gonna we're gonna have people be prejudiced based on nationality rather than ethnicity taking that and writing a story like that you cannot write a story in our world that does that because you cannot escape the all of the things that are wrapped up in ethnicity and nationality in our culture's just can't it's impossible but you can in a fantasy world you can postulate you know what what if and and go with that and it allows you to talk about problems and when our society in a way that realistic fiction just can't I mean go look at the Handmaid's Tale when Margaret Atwood wanted to approach some of these ideas she came up with a science fiction culture in order to explore things in a way that was separated too from our our current experience and so you know I'm preaching to the choir you guys all know this the question is down to what do we do about the fact that there is a lot of news media and a lot of people still in the academic world specifically in the art programs who immediately dismiss us based on the genre rather than the content of the books the people who say well Margaret Atwood isn't science fiction because it's good what do we do about that and I think we just ignore him right like the more that we as a community acknowledge different tastes exists and something can be good without us liking it like that's the thing I'd like us to see us work on not being afraid to share our opinion on why we think something doesn't work but also tempering that with a nun standing that something cannot work for me but can work for other people or and how can I explain this I feel like writing as art gets kind of sticky because on one hand the fact that we're dealing with ideas and concepts and things like this does naturally separate us from other some other forms of art like if you look at a painting in writing the author is explicitly going to write out often some themes which leads to a different type of discussion but I think we ignore the fact that a lot of times a book shares more with a painting than we think or even shares more with say a really well-prepared meal you can prepare the best salmon in the world and I will not like it don't like salmon I don't you know no matter how good it is she's not gonna like it and it's tricky as you know you're you're a critic and I've you know done some of this myself it is really tricky to learn to a stab wound between this is bad and this is something I don't like and really the best we can do oftentimes is just say hey here's the sort of stuff I like here's the sort of stuff I don't like if you're listening to me for a review and I don't like something understand that your tastes if your tastes align with mine you're probably not gonna like that that's like the event the big advantage of reviewers right if you find one who doesn't like the kinds of things you don't like and then they play a game and they're like you know what I didn't like it for these reasons you're like you are like me I'm not gonna like that game either they reviewers done a huge service or if that reviewers like I often like games like this this game worked for me then you as if you are like this is this is what critics do that is really handy for all of us because there's too much media to experience but there's something about us human nature particularly fandoms where we wanted us and them sort of narrative where we're like the things I like must be great literature and the things I don't like must be pieces of trash written by hacks think really bugs me and you know you can see it with the steaks not snobs right do you want to you want to get it like what is the right way to cook a steak well you'll have you know people who will admit that on all other points Oh everyone's opinion is valid what they like be like but then you're like I want my steak well-done and they're like you are an offense to steak I don't even eat my steaks with them but I'm telling you this sort of attitude can be really damaging when it gets into something like a fantasy or science fiction community more restart self-hating we start ostracizing people who like the wrong types of things we don't look at pieces of art like one thing I dislike that I've done a lot that I've started to realize is when you get like a movie reviewer and they're talking about a movie they love and they say it's not a perfect movie but and that phrase it's not a perfect movie where I stop but I'm like we'll wait you know it's one of your favorite movies you say it's not a perfect movie because it has this flaw in this flaw on this flaw but are those three different things things that other people would enjoy and in so doing like can a piece of art be perfect that just seems meaningless right like the piece of art is perfect in my opinion if the author created or the artist created the thing they wanted to create whether or not that thing rubs some people in the wrong way but still does that make sense this is all me kind of talking in circles but it's this hard way to look at art where I do not want to stifle criticism I don't want to stifle people from saying I really don't like this but I also want to say look if we start talking about things in a different way then maybe these people who are not giving due consideration to what we love will maybe see how we're acting and maybe learn from us they probably won't but who cares right let's just do a better job ourselves it's it's really funny to see someone so concisely put what I've tried been trying to build for four years now where it's here's my personality here's what I like I'm gonna split my reviews into subjective and objective criticisms right and I'm gonna always try to judge a book based off what it's trying to achieve a great example of that is I just read never die which was a novel that was action-packed fast paced and there was just a goal and it was a beeline to that goal but the author wanted to do that and I think he did a great job and so I tried to communicate in the review where I did a really good job of that great characters great personality wasn't my personal favorite right 10 out of built 9 out of 10 execution of that press right and it's it's important to find that and I feel like my favorite reviewers are always the one who will split the review and do here's what I objectively think Nina and there is you know what I subjectively have some problems with we're seeing a ton of this with with the new Kojima game right death stranding well yeah example of this done to an extreme where is it a bad game no it's a game that's targeted a subset of people who love it are you one of those subset of people find some reviewers you know and read what people yeah it's it's really it's been fascinating to watch the response to that that game because it kind of encapsulate this whole concept to me and I the only thing I'll have it I'll say is no this is not the way to handle it is the creator's response who's just saying people who don't like it aren't smart enough oh I hate that thing to say though right and boy you get you get that a lot from authors too they're not they're not refined enough to understand my taste yeah I'll not straight down this past is that they'll make me start naming names we don't want to do that but yes I'm totally with you on that man don't be like that folks if someone doesn't like your piece of art number one look and see if what they're saying is a legitimate weakness that you can work on keep it filed away in case it keeps coming up time and time again and you eventually right now might not understand it but might later or number two they just didn't like what you did it's art that's gonna happen okay I will say even if some is consistent criticism I wouldn't necessarily change it because if it's something that you feel gives your work personality I don't think that necessarily you should throw it away because I guarantee you you will eventually find people who like that you switch between first and third person every five paragraphs or something crazy you know that I mean I will say there are things that I've done that I originally I was like now this is just my style but over time I've come to realize oh wait I think from this criticism is teaching me how to approach what I want to do better so my intention will be more clear to the audience and that sort of thing is really handy but it's the sort of thing that takes you 10 years to start to figure out so I mean with with broken earth if you had told me someone switched from first second to third I would go yeah well it's brilliant the second person never do second person that's one of those rules right actually second person worked really well so mm-hmm although I will say that when I read the first sentence that was in the second person I has reaction of not that was when I did I did have the exact same response because I was an editor at a at a school magazine that did science fiction for a while and we occasionally got second person stories and I immediately you know was back in that mindset because every one of those was terrible and and yeah though but it I also knew that if anyone could pull it off it would be Nora because I loved the hundred thousand Kingdom's and her use of literary you know that kind of that crossing that you know like she's the the handshake across the aisle so to speak like you've got a lot of authors like I would say Pat Rothfuss is you an example who are people who are on the popular fiction aisle reaching across to the literary fiction island saying hey can I borrow some of your your use of language and things like that and Nora's on the other side she's like I think squarely in the literary fiction thing that's reaching into science fiction saying hey I'm gonna be the bridge that's gonna do the the great characterization world building that you get from a from a science fiction story particularly the interesting plot setups but I'm also going to take from literary fiction literary styling and use of language and meld those two together I mean we've seen people doing this before right Ursula was really great at this one of one of the great masters of kind of walking that line crossing the aisle and being on either side of it depending on which story she was writing so any author who can act as a gateway to fantasy I'm gonna be effect if you could if you can trick some people into realizing fantasy can be great I'm happy which according to my comments miss Borden has done to a flood of people so I don't know if you're already aware of that or not but it has been a lot of people's gateway into wider fantasy it's a yeah I've been very very excited to get that feedback a lot of people will say like the the Gateway for me was was Anne McCaffrey really that was the author I really got into that pulled me into the whole science fiction fantasy thing and hearing stories from people that'll email be in there usually basically the exact same language I use for an pulling me in Barbara Hambly was another one that did that for me and the same language I use describing those books they use describing Mistborn that's like that's a treat right because because it's that whole pay it forward thing where it's like wow the thing that I wanted to do because this other author inspired me I did and maybe I'm inspiring them and they'll then become you know the next and McCaffrey or Brandon Sanderson or whatever they'll be their own person but they'll be the next you know the next in the line of people who are inspired by by what the wonderful things that sci-fi fantasy can do so I I want to transition here we had a couple more fun light-hearted okay questions that round on these right sure I actually get through a few of them how do you like your eggs cooked ah scrambled usually in an egg sandwich um a little bit cheese would be great but I do like scrambled eggs so just know no sauce on top no just salt and pepper yeah I don't sauce on them I'm not Tabasco sauce or ketchup on eggs person either nothing against it but after having tried them that way I went back to you know my my I really like salty foods and anything that's adding a bit of sweetness or even too much spiciness distracts from the saltiness for me sound I tend to I tend to go with like the pure flavor of the eggs with salt it's just something that I think is tasty okay so there's the next question I like quite a bit you're in your when you're writing binges what's your go-to snack food to have on hand so right now next to my chair downstairs because we're in the winter season our pomegranates and sunflower seeds I like things I can fiddle with while I'm eating them if I'm working just because key you know giving my instead of the distraction of let's go check reddit if the distraction is oh let's grab a handful of seeds and start crunching on them just keeps you in the zone a little bit better I would do peanuts except number one I have a son with a peanut allergy number two peanuts are high enough calorie that trying to you know trying to stay alive long enough to finish the Stormlight archive and so so I will generally not do the peanuts anymore fair enough and it's the shell for me right I have to be able to fit a live it I'm a pistachio guy that's my guy yeah yeah same thing and when they started to sell me pistachios out of the shell and like you're missing the whole point yeah yeah I didn't even like them like I get a handful of peanuts out of the shell Nathan like something's wrong with this the flavors wrong I'm sure it's exactly the same it's all just mental but they taste better out of the shell to me music on or off while you're writing music on I have a playlist on Spotify that are the music that I listen to I have one you can go get right now from storm like three storm like through writing news anything i'm Mistborn one on spotify something like that and i have a storm life or one that i'm listen to you right now that i'll release when i really storm life or I have a skyward one that I put up that was my music for skyward mostly I'm so I'm listening to a lot of instrumental not a lot of things with lyrics some things with lyrics but oftentimes if it's the thing with lyrics it's the thing that I know the lyrics of really well so it's like a remix on a different song that I internalized all the lyrics to and so it's not pulling me out by having lyrics that can be sometimes a danger but depends some things with lyrics were just fine you know like and it depends on the scene right like there are times where I'll turn on Daft Punk or there'll be times where I'll turn on Metallica or there'll be times where I you know just whatever but you can listen to the general playlist mostly epic instrumentals two sets from hell is my go to anything that that that guy is Don Thomas I can version I'm going to say his name wrong that that artist kind of encapsulates my view of what epic instrumental really really that gets me excited to write a scene stuff so for me I just I just go movie scores or Lofa hip hop I just balance between the two yeah yeah I could totally see that so the the next bit here I had boys I thought be pretty fun I have a few quotes from other authors and I'd love to get you're just instinctual reaction to these things take on fantasy or the writing process the first is from Stephen King I figured let's go ahead and start with someone who's one of the fantasy not fantasy people yeah um if you don't have time to read you don't have time or the tools to write simple as that agreed listen yeah so you can't no one can teach you how to write but the closest you can get to being taught how to write is to be reading and internalizing what authors that you like are doing because you will you like people say you they want to take my class and I'm glad they want to take my class I think I can help them but I can't help them as much as they can help themselves by reading and kind of just naturally internalizing what what authors are doing and so yeah and the other the other point of that is and this is also from Stephen King um I really like what he talks about I'm not sure where if it's in on writing or not but he talks about the idea of becoming passionate about things and reading about those things and letting that inform your writing rather than reading writing textbooks and I think this is a truism for most people no piece of advice on writing is good for everyone but for most people if you are passionate about a topic and you immerse yourself in it and then let that inform your storytelling we have too many people i feel like who sit down to write fantasy and say I know what a fantasy story is I'm just going to write like the ones I've written before and on one hand that's good because you are internalizing narrative and that's gonna help you deal with narrative in interesting ways and you'll probably be better for all that reading but it's also gonna make you feel more bland because you're gonna start regurgitating everything you've read but if you have some sort of guiding star that you're like you know what I love baseball and the theory of baseball I'm going to fully immerse myself in this and I'm gonna write an epic fantasy story about a fantastical game that they play with magic in this world and someone who gets implicated in some sort of big scandal that's going to you know destroy the economy or something and write an epic fantasy like that that's using my love of baseball not baseball itself with my understanding of you know the Moneyball type of stuff of baseball in a fantasy world that book is going to sound way more interesting to all the potential readers I bet there are people listening right now it would be like wow I want to read that book right and if you can do that what you're gonna end up with is just gonna be a book you're more passionate about that's gonna use your you know your hobbies and show them off and then draw upon your extensive reading background and fantasy to make sure just in literature to make sure your characterizations are on point and things like this and your chances of having a stand out strong book by writing toward your passions there's just gonna be way higher so read but don't only just read fantasy read things that really fascinate you and try to try to ask how can I add something to this genre by bringing in something I love from elsewhere and that was that was the suggestion from people Stephen King that I'm butchering in the paraphrasing but I'm sure nice to find out where he where you actually said it I completely agree and it's been a continued truth between everyone I've talked to who writes where you know I'm writing right now about the age of exploration and the idea of manifest destiny and how that can result in such horrific things happening and I've I've read about so many horrible things that have happened it's very depressing but it's also very useful yes so this next one is from an author I've fallen in love with recently and that's Terry Pratchett yeah and it's the roots of fantasy go far deeper than mere dragons and elves right at the bottom at the tip of the root is the fear of the dark and the cold but once you've given darkness a name you have a measure of control yeah what sir Terry is talking about here is this idea that transition between myth to fantasy that I think is a really fascinating transition that what we have in fantasy writers today our storytellers like storytellers of all except we're all in on the idea that it is not real now that's you know not to say anything of people's mythologies and people's religions and things like that horse um what I'm what I'm saying here is in the old days if you wouldn't told the story about a you know a person who claimed a thousand-foot cliff everyone's like oh he must have heard about this that guy things actually happened somebody did it we're now for like you know they climb the cliffs of insanity we're all in on the idea that it's okay for this to not be real we can still get the same things out of it this in part this idea that that you you put a name on the darkness a lot of people read I think one thing that attracts us to fiction is this idea of experiencing extremes in human condition in a way that's a you know in effigy so to speak someone else in this story while I'm reading the story I'm experiencing what Harry Potter is feeling it's things I've never actually experienced but it actually in some ways helps me when I experienced similar things in my own life even though there's not going to be you know a person with the face on the back of his head threatening to kill me I might you know have similarly stressful experiences and there's this theory that that by experiencing these things in by proxy in our fiction we get better at dealing them in our own lives and I think there's a measure of truth to that okay okay and the last one will hit you with here and I know you probably have to run for too long so we'll wrap up soon here is from Harper Lee and I love this one I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing this talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide do you find that to be true ohayo may be mowed through than ever yeah now there are ways to do this without having to develop quite as thick a hide the first thing is to get off of social media and not let yourself touch it um like if you're gonna have a thin hide don't respond do not engage do not if you can avoid it just don't read the you know or do what what is very handy sometimes I will say like to so my assistants hey go read the one-star reviews see if there are any things present them to me in a way that if there's something that I need to work on that is going to be handy for me actually the two star reviews are generally better for that than two and three stars because the two and three stars for people that you know a lot of the one-star reviews are I got bored in the first ten chapters of the Stormlight archive why do people love this it is dull and you know what dude your rights that is the wrong book for you totally on board with that this book is not for everyone right that's the one star reviews and then the two star reviews will often be like man I wanted to like this book or the three stars but this thing held me back a lot of times those are just things that are aspects of the book that are piece of the art sometimes they're things were you like oh you know I could work on that I can do better on that having someone you trust you can kind of go through those so you don't read them yourselves because it's a truism of fiction that you will focus on the bad and it can ruin your day right even like someone like me I'm pretty thick-skinned right I don't generally have big like I said emotional swings and at one point in time the radiance was the best reviewed book in the history of books if you used Goodreads as an example which is totally you know not that another thing but it was the top moves the top fiction title of all reviews and yet if I read the bad review that hits me in the wrong way that's all I'll focus on right and yeah so even if you have a thick skin that can be hard but I would say you know internalizing this idea of people can dislike things and it's okay internalizing the idea of I write mostly for me to create the piece of art I want to create I created that people don't like it it's not an insult it's okay in fact you know it's okay for them to not like it it's you know it's part of the discussion and if you can't take that just not reading that it's probably good for you but it is important the the worst thing you can generally do though is is to respond that doesn't mean you shouldn't engage with people but it's really hard to get down that balance of engaging in a way that is just not creating a big ole fight and nothing's productive nothing gets productive when an author is just yelling no my artist would why can't you see my art is good these people think my art is good you need to see my art is good that just doesn't get you anywhere and so and it's it's very natural instinct to do that don't do it well thank you so much for coming on Brennan I appreciate it immensely starsight we'll be out I think in four days at the time of recording this yeah it's Tuesday next week sound mmm I will have a link to pre-order it down below thank you so much here my pleasure

Channel: Daniel Greene

Views: 737,773

Keywords: brandon sanderson, brandon sanderson interview, cosmere, wheel of time, the wheel of time, daniel greene, fantasy chat, robert jordan, stormlight archive, mistborn, starsight

Id: FLPGhJOFEoE

Length: 84min 16sec (5056 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 23 2019